Lifted from the comments, some thoughts on empathy – or more specifically, ostentatious pseudo-empathy, as practised by so many of Our Progressive Betters. It began with a discussion of this lady here, a triumphant, practised shoplifter, and other, likeminded beings whose proximity might not be desired:
And Chow Bag’s subsequent comment,
The words vile beast did spring to mind. And if you wanted to radically lower your estimation of the human species, she’d be the gal to call. Likewise, I would guess, much of her social media audience, the ones applauding her habits, her predation, and clicking like.
As Wanye Burkett has often illustrated, despising such creatures, wishing them gone and bricked up in a dungeon, is not a result of some failure of empathy, as many progressives would have us believe, but of precisely the opposite. One can understand their feelings, their assumptions, their monstrously selfish worldview, and find it all degenerate, worthy only of disgust. In fact, the more you try to imagine yourself in a similar situation and how you might behave, the more alien and repugnant their behaviour is likely to seem.
Or as Mr Burkett puts it,
If all empathy is supposed to mean is that you just assume everybody has the exact motivations that you do, then the concept is useless. What I’m doing above is what actual empathy looks like. It means seeing things from another person’s point of view. It means considering brains that are different from your own. It means not assuming that everybody is motivated by the same things you are.
Understanding the mental states of others, their motives and assumptions, insofar as one can, doesn’t necessarily result in positive feelings towards them, or identification with them, or lead to a default forgiveness and willingness to excuse their behaviour. Simply put, if your “empathy” results in you being endlessly forgiving, endlessly accommodating, over and over again, then you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.
Or not doing it at all.
In the comments, Nikw211 added,
It’s actually not that difficult to understand the mentality at work.
Indeed. Yet progressives, despite their claims, seem uniquely bad at it. To a degree one might regard as surreal.
And which in turn may explain the progressive dislike, often vehement dislike, of the reality series Cops, mentioned here, which revealed just how different minds can be, and which made the mentality of the criminals – the patterns of malevolence and selfishness – impossible to miss. Thereby making pretentious sympathy and indulgence much more difficult to muster.
If an illustration of progressive empathy is needed, we should perhaps revisit burglary victim and Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan. A woman whose mental processes are oddly convoluted and, shall we say, not entirely convincing:
Readers may wish to ponder how someone can tell us, vividly and at length, about how distressing the experience of being burgled is – the anger, the shaking, the persistent sleep loss, the sense of violation – and who can simultaneously dismiss that same experience as a minor inconvenience, a mere
bagatelle. As if it were “nothing” compared to the imagined woes of the monsters who treated her with utter, unequivocal contempt, by violating her home and thieving her belongings. Monsters who, statistically, have almost certainly done it before and will likely do it again. And who, with practice,
will get bolder.
Readers may also wish to ponder the implicit conceit that the burglars… are the real victims and should therefore be spared any meaningful consequence of their own chosen actions, their own sociopathy. Because, apparently, one should sympathise with the people breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff. In one’s own car.
Perhaps these are skills only available to Guardian columnists.
Readers will also note Ms Spargo-Ryan’s expressed priorities – her preference for being seen by her peers as a “beautiful person,” aglow with progressive empathy and understanding, over the wellbeing of her law-abiding neighbours and other nearby residents, the people being targeted and violated by the same criminal gang that she excuses with great, if weird, enthusiasm. Neighbours and nearby residents to whom no such empathy is extended.
Likewise, as illustrated in subsequent comments, our Guardian columnist’s zeal in blocking and disdaining those who dared to demur from her affectations – and her claim that I, your gracious host, was much worse, much more scary, than the feral creatures who broke into her home in the middle of the night, and into the homes of her neighbours, while brandishing carving knives.
Because I suggested that her infinite forgiveness may not be entirely realistic, or indeed moral.
If another example of progressive empathy and its consequences is required, this one, via Mr Muldoon, seems suitably vivid.
And very much related, this trilogy of posts, which includes scenes that may challenge the progressive empathy reflex and make such affectations harder to sustain.
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